by Ian Rogers
“But we’ve all handled the book before,” Thumper said. “I’ve flipped through the damn thing dozens of times.”
Wendy said, “I don’t think simply touching the symbols is enough. I think Horowitz took an entire page from the book and applied it to his bare chest.”
Everyone was silent for a moment.
Then Vanners said: “What difference would it make where the contact was made?”
“I’m not sure the precise location matters, but I think the contact has to be total.” She picked up the baggie containing the single page and pantomimed pressing it against her chest. “All along we thought it was some sort of language barrier. Or code. But that’s not it at all. It’s a . . . formula. An equation. And I think this energy, this force, is only activated when the entire formula has been imprinted. It’s not enough to get some of it on your finger or your hand. I believe that the purpose of Black Book was to use human flesh as a conduit for whatever energies it contained.”
“And what energies would those be?” Summerhill asked.
“I don’t know,” Wendy replied. “But I think we should make it a priority to find out.”
16
In the wake of Professor Horowitz’s death, things began to move very fast on Project Wellspring.
In a week, the number of personnel at the glove factory doubled. Vanners gave Wendy the probationary title of Supervisor of Research & Development and put her to work on determining a way to safely test the power of Black Book without anyone else getting killed.
The symbols in the book were difficult to crack, but it turned out she was right. Black Book was, in actuality, a collection of ancient formulae. Thumper started calling it The Great Cook Book from Hell, since one of the key symbols in these formulae was indeed human beings (as Horowitz had posthumously confirmed). It was a disturbing discovery made that much worse by the book’s clear description of exactly what kind of human beings it preferred.
Namely, young ones.
17
“Oh God! Are you saying it’s made of people?”
“It’s not made of people,” Wendy said. “But people make it work. They’re like . . . the main ingredient.”
It was Saturday, and Wendy and Thumper were walking down Main Street toward Maple Lane.
“But still, if people go in, and something comes out . . .” Thumper shook his head to dispel the horrific images in his mind.
“That’s the theory.”
“So when Horowitz slapped that piece of paper on his chest, what? Some tentacled nasty materialized in the room and gave him an appendectomy?”
“I think Horowitz was a victim of . . . electrical feedback.”
“How’s that?”
“The page he took from the book was part of a set. You know those pages where the symbols run from the left page to the right?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I think the equation only works if you use both pages on two separate people. Horowitz used only the one and the damn thing, well, malfunctioned.”
“That’s one way of putting it.”
They walked for a bit. Then Wendy asked: “Did Vanners tell you about the test subjects?”
“Yeah, he said they were volunteers. I figure, they must not know what happened to old Skeletor, or else they would have kept their mouths shut.”
“Not if they thought they were getting something out of it.”
“Like what?”
Wendy stopped and turned to face him. “They’re death row inmates, Thumper. Vanners made some sort of deal with the state. The cons know the whole situation. He had them sign non-disclosure forms and everything.”
“What?”
Wendy nodded. “Vanners said they have nothing to lose, which is why most of them agreed. But . . .” She shook her head doubtfully. “Testing on humans. It’s not right.”
“Hell,” Thumper said, “nothing’s been right around here for weeks. And it doesn’t show much sign of getting any better.”
18
On a hot day in August, four months after Wendy first came to the glove factory and Coyote Hills, Project Wellspring received its first two human volunteers.
Johnny Spartan and Elroy McIntyre were on loan from the Nevada correctional system. Dressed in orange prison overalls and leg irons, they trotted into the testing area flanked by a pair of security officers.
The guards took them over to where Thumper and Tara were waiting for them, each with a page of Black Book in one latex-gloved hand, and a device that looked like a miniature paint-roller in the other.
Wendy watched from the observation booth that overlooked the room. Her arms were stiffly crossed, and she was feeling extremely tense. Vanners stood beside her, and she thought she could feel the same nervous vibes coming off him. His eyes were slightly puffy, too, as if he had slept poorly last night.
He thumbed the intercom. “Let’s get this thing rolling.”
In the testing area, Thumper gave him a thumbs-up, though the look on his face was dark and grave.
Wendy watched as both of the convicts unsnapped the clasps on their overalls and exposed their bare chests. One of them said something to Tara, and she flushed and turned away. The guard standing behind the con gave him a quick jab with the butt of his rifle. The con smiled and stood up straighter.
The guards nodded to Thumper and Tara and they stepped forward to do their part. They each placed their page flat against the chest of their respective volunteer. Then they ran the miniature paint-rollers over the pages a few times for good measure.
Wendy watched it all with utter amazement. It’s sticking to their skin. It’s nothing but six-thousand-year-old parchment and charcoal, but it’s sticking to their skin.
Tara and Thumper stepped back and exchanged a look. What happens now?
Wendy turned to Vanners, but he was staring at the readout of one of the hundred or so pieces of monitoring equipment packed into the small room. He must have seen something he didn’t like, because he came back to the window in a rush, pushing a lab technician out of the way. He stabbed the intercom button.
“Tara, Thumper,” he said briskly, “please vacate the room.”
Tara and Thumper exchanged another look, and started toward the door set in the tempered steel wall. Thumper cast one look back over his shoulder at the two cons. They had come in swaggering and smiling. They looked different now, although he couldn’t say exactly how.
A moment later, Tara and Thumper joined Wendy and Vanners in the observation booth. Vanners’ attention was once again glued to the readout of one particular instrument.
“Something’s happening in there,” he said.
Wendy couldn’t tell if it was fear or excitement she heard in his voice—probably a little of both.
She turned back to the window and saw that something was happening to the cons, all right. One of them seemed to be okay, but the other had dropped to one knee, as if he were proposing marriage to his buddy.
Whatever he was doing, the guards didn’t like it. They had moved a discreet distance away and raised their rifles held to high port.
“He thought he was getting a rub-on tattoo,” Tara said in a low, childlike voice. The others turned and looked at her. “That’s what he said to me in there.”
Wendy looked back into the testing area just as the other con doubled over. He was trying to peel the page of Black Book off his chest, but it wouldn’t come off.
The security guards backed further away, toward the door. Vanners was on his way to the intercom to tell them to hold their position when the event that would be referred to as “realization” in top-secret government reports suddenly took place.
There was a brief flash of light that seemed to have no source. The scene in the testing area seemed unchanged. Then the group in the observation booth realized that although they could see the convicts, writhing on the floor in soundless agony, they could also see through them, as if they were ghosts.
But you don’t usually see ghosts in so much pain, Wendy thought.
The pages from Black Book were now lying on the floor of the testing area.
Why not? They’ve already done their part.
The apparitions began to shrink and collapse into themselves. Because the observation booth was soundproof, the entire sequence played out in silence. It was like watching a clip of some special-effects-laden movie for which the soundtrack had yet to be recorded.
There were now two spheres of shimmering blue light hovering over the floor of the testing area. Great spikes of electricity crackled off them. The spikes grew taller and taller until they met in the centre of the room. Something began to happen, some sort of reaction.
It’s happening, Wendy thought. I don’t know what it is but it’s happening!
Something that looked like a swarm of fireflies began to materialize in the space between the two spheres. They grew larger as the spheres channelled energy into them. The fireflies started to merge with one another to form an expanding ball of red-orange light. It spread across the air like a festering wound, and by the time the blue spheres had fizzled out, their energy spent, the ball of light filled the entire room.
There was another flash, and in the half-second before it disappeared, Wendy glimpsed an enormous silhouette against the red-orange glow. Then she was looking at something her eyes refused to transmit to the receptors in her brain. Something that at first glance looked like some strange new species of whale.
It lay on the floor of the testing area, unmoving, in about a foot of steaming green water that must have been brought from whatever place it had been snatched.
A thirty-foot-long creature with the basic shape of a whale, but with the plates and ridges of a rhinoceros. Its mouth, crusted with things that might have been barnacles, hung slightly open to reveal rows of triangular shark’s teeth, each one as big as a human fist.
Of the convicts, there was no sign.
19
Over the next two weeks, several more guests of the state of Nevada came to Project Wellspring and stood shirtless, smiling even, as pages from Black Book were applied to their chests. They never smiled for very long. The entities that appeared in their place were a rogue’s gallery of nightmarish entities and hellish abominations. They shared only one common similarity.
They all showed up either dead or dying.
To anyone who saw one of these creatures suddenly appear in a room where there had been only a pair of men before, this would have seemed like a blessing. But Vanners only grew more annoyed as the experiments went on.
With the exception of the whale-thing, Wendy saw none of these creatures. Since she, Thumper, and Tara were technically part of R&D, they were not authorized to be on Sub-Level Two, where the experiments took place. Vanners had only invited Wendy that first time as a courtesy—perhaps because he wasn’t convinced anything was going to happen.
What little she learned about the experiments, she gleaned from the hushed (and horrified) conversations she overheard from those in the Applications department.
According to one worker, the reason the creatures were showing up dead was because their DNA was in such a state of flux that they couldn’t live any longer than a few minutes before undergoing complete cellular breakdown.
One creature that showed up must have been especially bad because Vanners gave the entire Applications department the rest of the day off.
Afterward, he had gone to Wendy and asked her about the pictograms in Black Book, specifically the ones that denoted the human form. Wendy brought up a high-resolution scan of the symbol on her computer.
“Why’s it so small and bent over like that?” Vanners asked, pointing at the curled, almost comma-shaped symbol.
“Thumper thinks it might be symbolic of the act of realization,” she lied. “The bent-over figure representing the subject undergoing the . . . process.”
Vanners nodded but his eyes had a faraway look.
He walked off, zipping through the cubicle-maze like a man on a mission.
Wendy supposed that was probably close to the truth.
Over the following weeks the stories she heard were no longer about convicts.
They were about children.
20
They arranged to meet at Wendy’s house. She was on the porch when they arrived, pacing back and forth.
“Do you think it’s safe to talk out here?” Thumper asked.
“The insides of the houses are almost certainly bugged,” Wendy said, “but I can’t see them bugging the outsides. It doesn’t matter anyway. What I want to do—what I have to do—is going to happen tonight, and they won’t have time to stop me.”
“Tonight?” Thumper exclaimed. “Jesus, Wendy. If what we’ve heard is true, then we have to do something, yes, of course—but tonight? We need to plan this out, we need to—”
“I have a plan,” Wendy said, in what she hoped was a confident voice. “If we do it quickly, I think we can get away with it. But it has to be tonight.”
“But how do we know the stories are true?” Tara said. “How do we really know they’ve started using children in the experiments?”
“I told you what Vanners said,” Wendy said. “He asked me about the human pictograms in Black Book. I’m almost positive he was testing me, trying to feel out how much I knew. He’s figured out that the key to bringing over live creatures from whatever godforsaken hell they come from is not scum-of-the-earth death row inmates. It’s children. The younger the better, I’m willing to bet.”
Tara paled. She lowered her eyes and nodded, as if she had known the truth all along but needed to hear it spoken aloud.
“The day before Vanners came to see me something happened. Something that may not have tipped him off to the truth, but it certainly put him on the right track.”
Thumper perked up. “What was it?”
“I can’t say for certain,” Wendy said, “but I’d be willing to make a guess.”
She let them think about it for a moment.
“Oh God,” Tara blurted. “You think they killed an innocent man.”
Thumper ran a trembling hand over his face and sat down hard on the porch steps. The thought that Black Book had been able to do what a jury of a man’s peers had been either unable or unwilling to do made him feel sick to his stomach.
“I don’t think it happened on purpose,” Wendy said. “But I think it clued Vanners in on what Black Book really wants.”
“You’re talking about babies.” Tara said. “You really think they’d do that? Kill babies?”
“I think Vanners will do whatever’s necessary to bring those things over alive and healthy.”
“But why?” Thumper said. “What the hell do they want with them?”
“My guess would be military applications.”
“What, you think they’re going to harness them? Train them like attack dogs? Do you think those things can be housebroken?”
“No,” Wendy said, “but I think they’re going to try.”
21
Wendy moved stealthily down the corridor to the gymnasium, constantly looking over her shoulder, waiting for the men in the black fatigues to pop out and arrest her. What would happen then? Would she be charged under the Secrecy Act? Or would she be shot on the spot and buried somewhere in the desert?
Tara and Thumper were back in the office area, sitting in their cubicles and waiting for her. Since the experiments had begun, the R&D staff had switched to a rotating evenings-and-midnights schedule. So there was nothing unusual about them working late.
Wendy slipped quietly into the dark gymnasium and over to the equipment closet.
There was an electronic card-reader on the door. It was a recent addition.
The reason for the heightened security was related to a story Wendy had heard from the Applications rumour mill.
Since they had switched from convicts to children, the
experiments had been successful. Supposedly the armoury on Sub-Level Three had been converted into some kind of holding pen. It was here that the creatures—the live ones, that is—were being kept.
Wendy had no intention of going down to Sub-Level Three, which the Applications people called “the Zoo,” but she had been very interested in the part about how the weapons and ammunition in the armoury had been temporarily moved into the large and mostly vacant gymnasium equipment closet.
She took out her key-card, crossed herself with it, and slid it into the reader.
The green light came on and the lock snapped open.
Wendy muttered a prayer of thanks and stepped into the dark room.
22
Her second stop was to the storage closet where all of Horowitz’s belongings had been stored following the investigation into his death. Since it was located on Sub-Level One, Wendy’s key-card gave her access to it.
She found the stack of cardboard boxes that contained all of the books and papers and other assorted items that had been taken from the professor’s study. She found his wallet in a plastic evidence bag, and took it out. The leather crackled when she opened the wallet, making her think of the way the pages of Black Book had crackled when she opened it for the first time.
Just as she had hoped, the security guards hadn’t bothered to catalogue the wallet’s contents. If they had, they surely would have confiscated the red plastic card with “S3” printed on it in gold letters.
23
When Wendy returned to the office area, Thumper and Tara popped out of their cubicles like a pair of jack-in-the-boxes.
“Did you get them?
Wendy slipped her hands into the wide pockets of her coat and took out a pair of nine-millimetre pistols. From her inside pocket she produced a number of extra clips. She hadn’t bothered to grab one for Tara. She had never fired a gun before, and they all agreed that tonight wasn’t the best time to start.